1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an automatic synthesis machine for automatic synthesis of compounds and, more particularly, to an automatic synthesis machine suitable for creation and analysis of a protocol prescribing the procedure of synthesis.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In the fields of studies on pharmacy, life science, chemistry and materials or the like, synthesis of a plurality of compounds is performed experimentally for determination of the characteristics and synthesis conditions or the like of compounds. An automatic synthesis machine is well known as a device for the synthesis of compounds. The automatic synthesis machine has a plurality of reactors, and a product resulting from synthesis in each reactor is recovered for every reactor.
Setting the chemical synthesis procedure called a protocol, the synthesis of compounds is performed by the automatic synthesis machine using a reagent and a solvent according to the protocol. In creation of the protocol, there is a need to specify vessels, together with operations (suction and injection) related to the specific vessels. The vessels are specified by assigning designations to specify the vessels on a vessel basis for making an entry of the designations in the protocol. As a result, there is a problem in that a long time is required for creation of the protocol. In particular, synthesis requiring the complicated procedure where a wide variety of reagents and solvents are used results in an increase in number of characters (the number of characters in an individual line) of one protocol or number of protocol lines.
Further, since a protocol is a kind of a program prescribing a procedure of synthesis and is written in only characters, it is difficult to specify vessels and also to ascertain the operation contents related to the specific vessels. In particular, in case where the procedure is complicated as a wide variety of reagents and solvents are used, the operation contents related to the specific vessels are hard to be ascertained only from the protocol.
Furthermore, in an automatic synthesis machine, synthesis of a wide variety of compounds is required at a time in some cases. In the prior art, synthesis of a wide variety of compounds would need a reaction rack formed by arraying a plurality of vessels for storage of reagents, solvents and products resulting from synthesis in the shape of a matrix with rows and columns, and there is also a need for creation of a synthesis protocol prescribing the vessels and the operations (suction and injection) related to the vessels according to the procedure of synthesis.
In a protocol for use in a synthesis carried out by an automatic synthesis machine in the prior art, the procedure of the synthesis is prescribed by specifying a vessel and also specifying to the specified vessel an operations such as suction or injection of a reagent, solvent, product or the like. Thus, according to the above protocol, although it is possible to ascertain a series of synthesis procedures, the problem with the above protocol is that it is not possible to easily ascertain and verify the process of chemical reaction on inspection in vessel units. Accordingly, for ascertaining an operation for every vessel, a person who creates a protocol has to interpret the protocol for verification after construction of chemical reactions for every vessel.